Microsoft at CES: Natal, Classic Arcade Games

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer gave the keynote address at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday night, speaking a bit about the future of the Xbox 360.

As anyone with a single functioning brain cell could have already told you, Project Natal, Microsoft’s new camera-based motion controller, will be released during the 2010 holiday season.

During the keynote, another one of those funny little sentences popped up again: Engadget reported that executive Robbie Bach said that Natal will “work with your existing console.” We heard the same weird phrasing at E3, and that was quickly followed up with a story from 1up that spelled out their take on why Microsoft would be saying such strange things: A new Xbox may be in the works.

Game Room for the Xbox 360 will let you build your own virtual arcade by buying classic games like Atari's Tempest.Image courtesy Microsoft

One more big announcement: Microsoft will debut a new service called Game Room. Like Nintendo’s Virtual Console for Wii and Sony’s PlayStation Archives, it’ll let you download classic games. Unlike those services, you can access those games through a 3-D virtual world interface, using your Xbox 360 Avatar.

You can buy games for $5 each, which will let you play them on your Xbox 360 and Windows PC. Or you can pay $3 to play the game on a single platform. $3 per game, every game? That’s a pretty awesome deal, considering that classic arcade games on Wii cost anywhere from $5 to $10.

There’s also a pay-per-play option in which you can pay 50 cents to demo a game once. Microsoft says you can invite your Xbox friends over to check out the games in your Game Room, although the press release doesn’t quite make it clear exactly how much access they’ll have to your virtual goods.

Here’s the best part. Although the service will launch this spring with 30 games from the arcade, Atari 2600, and Intellivision, Microsoft says that within three years the number of games will be up to 1,000. That’s thousand. That’s awesome.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.